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An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.

In the middle of Iowa, I saw one of the most amazing works of modern art ever made, “Mural” by Jackson Pollock (more on that in a coming blog post). A few hours later, I marveled at the unintended gorgeousness of street light falling over and through a highway overpass.

Here’s my point. With the history of art being long and so much great art already made, in a world filled with accidental beauty, it takes guts to be an artist. To attempt to make things of meaning and beauty, to put them up and invite the world to come for a look is pretty courageous.

One of the things that I love about Gallery Night & Day, which takes place Friday evening and Saturday, aside from the opportunity to see great art, of course, is what it means to show up for the artists.

If you intend to show up for this round of the four-times-a-year, snow-or-shine event, I’ve got a couple of itineraries I can recommend. One features contemporary photography, a medium we all can relate to. The other I’ll dub the Art Swami Tour, a group of shows featuring artists who’ve created consistently great art in the region.

The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, 530 N. 13th St., has been emphasizing conceptual art-photography in its programming in recent years and continues this concern with a new show, “The Europeans,” an exhibit of richly colored, psychologically charged photography by Tina Barney.

The 20 images of wealthy Europeans, shot between 1996 and 2004 on a personal Grand Tour that Barney took through Austria, Italy, England, Spain, France and Germany, resemble the portrait paintings of eras past in size and lusciousness, according to the Haggerty. The works also present “decisive moments of honesty” and “less-than-ideal-takes on her subjects” as well.

British conceptual artist John Stezaker splices and weds together old portraits for another new photo show at the Haggerty, “Marriage.” Stezaker creates new portraits, caricatures of his subjects, sometimes blurring gender lines by combining female and male faces.

It may not be a photo show, but if you do go to the Haggerty, you’ll want to take a look at the 25 lithographs created by notable New York School artist Philip Guston as well. The prints were made during the last two months of the artist’s life and reveal something of Guston’s love of drawing, according to the Haggerty.

Dean Jensen is showing a trio of artists at his gallery, 759 N. Water St., none of whom are familiar to me. You’ve got to hand it to Jensen for finding new talent, for surprising us and for taking chances on emerging artists. One of the artists is a young photographer.

“Dane Haman’s primary subject appears to be the day to dayness of life in Wisconsin, but his color and black and white photographs reveal the state’s culture with a vision that is fresh and frequently idiosyncratic,” Jensen states on the gallery website. The images by Haman I’ve seen online (the show is not open as I write this) appear to have a matter-of-fact beauty. One in particular, titled “Cole Haman,” featuring the artist’s brother lying on a bed, has the look of a modern painting, with beautifully composed segments of color and light.

Jensen also will introduce printmaker Tyanna J. Buie and painter Luis Galvez in this show, “A Painter, Photographer and Printmaker.” Buie will exhibit a large-scale narrative about her childhood, about being shuttled between foster homes. Galvez’s works “radiate a magical realism that may be close in tone to that misting from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels,” Jensen states.

On view at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, 839 S. 5th St., is the 5th Annual Juried Exhibition of the Coalition of Photographic Arts. For the show, Chicago art dealer Catherine Edelman, who specializes in photography, looked through 450 photographic images to select the 30 artists featured in this show, which will close after Saturday. One of the great strengths of this exhibit each year is that it is a carefully juried show that represents a diverse range of approaches to photography from across theMidwest.

Some of the photographers’ names will be familiar — artists such as Eddee Daniel,Tara Bogart and Vicki Reed, among others — while others will be quite new.

The Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, 1000 N. Broadway, is showing photographs by David Schalliol, part of a collaboration with MSOE assistant professor Michael Carriere, who is researching the impact the financial crisis has had on the built environment in Milwaukee and other cities. The photographs elegantly document the sites where derelict properties have been repurposed for particularly productive uses.

Now, for the Swamis. If you’d like an itinerary that showcases particularly accomplished, regional artists, here you go.

Anne Kingsbury, a beloved local artist and the executive director of Woodland Pattern BookCenter, will have a retrospective show at RedLine Milwaukee, 1422 N. 4th St. The show will feature works never seen here before as well as pieces that have been in progress for 30 years. Kingsbury exhumes meaning from the minutia of daily life, the heaps of seemingly inessential tasks that she faces each day — and transforms them into intricate, often beaded, works of art.

The Tory Folliard Gallery, 233 N. Milwaukee St., is presenting the first solo show of another regional luminary, Fred Stonehouse, in several years. Stonehouse’s surrealist paintings borrow imagery from a diverse range of visual sources, including the symbols of the artist’s Catholic upbringing, antique sideshow banners and the hybrid beings of beloved fairy tales, among many other things. Stonehouse heightens our awareness of the oddity of familiar things.

Michelle Grabner, an Oshkosh native and the chairwoman of the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will exhibit a new body of work at the Green Gallery, 1500 N. Farwell Ave., in a show titled “Cottage Work.” These new paintings, while still part of Grabner’s ongoing interest in the Minimalist grid, also are about craft and weaving. Grabner’s show will be open to the public only on Saturday, Gallery Day. The gallery opens at 2 p.m. and an opening reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m.

At the new gallery at Saint John’s on the Lake, 1800 N. Prospect Ave., the Museum of Wisconsin Artis presenting an exhibit of drawings by one of the state’s most known artists, Carl von Marr. The Milwaukee-born painter died in 1936.

If you are looking for a roster of mainstays, you can’t go wrong visiting the Peltz Gallery,1119 E. Knapp St., for Cissie Peltz’s “Return of the Men” exhibit. This show, quite a tradition, will feature the work of regional aces such as Warrington Colescott and John Sayers, as well as national names, including Sam Gilliam, Jim Dine, Ed Paschke and Kehinde Wiley. Peltz puts on a free French brunch from 1 to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.

Finally, if you enjoyed seeing Debbie Callahan’s “Madonna and Child” on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Christmas Day, an annual tradition for the paper, you might appreciate seeing it in person as part of the “Madonna & Child Interpreted” exhibit at Soup’s On, 221 N. Water St. A closing reception for both the show, featuring 31 artists and curated by William Zuback, and the restaurant and gallery will be held Friday from 6 to 10 p.m. The event will include poetry and performance as well.

The Historic Third Ward Association provides a full list of official Gallery Night & Day venues.

About Mary Louise Schumacher

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. She writes about culture, design, the urban landscape and Milwaukee's creative community. Art City is her award-winning cultural page and a community of more than 20 contributing writers and artists.

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Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.